‘I’ve asked for the post-mortem on Sarah Taylor’s body to be considered priority, so I’m hoping we might be able to—’ Alex stopped talking, aware that Harry was paying her words no attention. His mind was elsewhere, betrayed by the glazed expression his face wore.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, closing the door to his office behind her.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Here.’ Gesturing to the screen of his desktop computer, he reached for the monitor and turned it towards Alex.
There was a video paused on the screen: a low-lit room, walls adorned with posters and flyers; an unmade bed. On the bed, naked except for a pair of black French knickers, was a young woman, barely in her twenties and possibly still a teenager. Her brunette hair hung long, partially obscuring her face.
Alex looked at the superintendent questioningly. ‘What’s this?’
He clicked play. The girl rose on to her knees, a thumb hooked into her underwear as the fingers of her other hand pushed back a length of hair from her face. She stared directly into the camera, her eyes widening as she responded to an unheard instruction from her audience on the other side of the screen.
Alex felt the office floor shift beneath her.
‘It’s her, isn’t it? Harry asked, pausing the recording once more.
Alex looked back at the screen. She looked so different, yet so unmistakably her.
‘What happens next?’
‘Here, or on the recording?’
‘The recording.’
‘You don’t want to watch for yourself?’
Alex shot him a scathing look. ‘No.’
Harry shook his head. ‘You can use your imagination.’
They both looked back to the monitor, though neither wanted to acknowledge what they were met with there.
On the monitor, DC Chloe Lane remained poised, frozen; her thumb still hooked into her knickers.
Chapter Forty-Two
It was easier that day for Chloe to gain access to the things she needed. She had slipped from the team meeting without speaking to anyone and gone to a quiet corner of the incident room to access a computer. There was never going to be a right time. Now seemed as good a time as any, and she already felt she had wasted too much.
No one believed her brother wasn’t a killer. Chloe knew that despite Alex’s loyalties, she too was sceptical. Why shouldn’t she be, when all the evidence stacked against Luke was so incriminating? Until she had something to back up her suspicions, even Alex wasn’t going to take her seriously.
Chloe retrieved a memory stick from her pocket. She had tried the previous afternoon to access the files she needed, but had been interrupted by Dan Mason. She’d waited until today for another opportunity.
She turned the sound off on the speakers and logged on to the system. The day before, she had managed to access the files, but there hadn’t been enough time to download them. She returned to them now, keeping one eye on a couple of colleagues talking at the far side of the room.
She clicked copy and waited.
Alex had been caught in a shower soon after leaving the station and her hair – longer than she had allowed it to grow in some time – was a tangled mess, pulled back and knotted into the smallest of buns at the nape of her neck. Her shirt and jacket were creased and she felt sticky beneath her clothing despite the bite of January air that nipped at her skin as she got from the car.
Her mind was already a messy tangle of thoughts: Lola, Sarah, Chloe. What the hell had she witnessed on the screen of that computer?
It occurred to her later that her first thought when she had seen him had been of her appearance, and she had reprimanded herself for having been so vain. Yet, had she known she would see him there, in the supermarket, Alex knew that despite everything else that was going on she would have made more of an effort. It would have done little to soften the blow of what she had seen, but simply being slightly more presentable might have done something – anything – to prevent her from feeling so inadequate.
As it was, when she saw Rob in the supermarket that evening she both looked and felt a mess.
One of the worst parts of it – a part that insulted Alex so keenly, though there were so many other elements of that moment that caused equal offence – was the fact that Rob had tried to pretend at first that he hadn’t seen her. He had glanced along the aisle, looked directly at her, and turned away quickly as though she didn’t exist. It had stung like a slap, and even hours later she found herself unable to let it go.
But then there was the other thing: the thing that rendered Alex momentarily immobile, frozen by the rows of baked beans as she looked on in disbelief.
There was a child sitting on Rob’s shoulders.
A boy of around five years old was sitting on his shoulders, laughing, as a girl – slightly older, maybe seven – danced in the aisle, her wellingtons making sucking noises each time she lifted a foot from the floor. There was a woman crouched just behind the girl, scanning a row of tinned soups. Alex watched, transfixed, as the woman turned, looked up and said something to Rob. She continued to watch as her ex-husband said something in response and the woman stood, taking the young girl by the hand.
She didn’t allow time to talk herself out of it.
‘Rob,’ Alex said, giving the woman a brief smile as she approached them. The woman smiled back. She was attractive, Alex caught herself thinking. Younger than she was. Quite a bit younger.
The look on Rob’s face said he hadn’t expected her to be quite so confident. ‘Alex.’ The word wobbled off his tongue. ‘Uhh… nice to see you.’
Alex narrowed her eyes slightly. Then the truth of what she was witnessing hit her. The woman was smiling at her, the kind of pained smile that delivered an unwelcome pity. She had clearly heard the name ‘Alex’ before. This woman knew who she was, in the context of ‘ex-wife’ at least.
‘And you,’ Alex said, having to force the words out. ‘Anyway, bit of a rush. See you.’
The little girl smiled up at her before continuing to suck up her wellingtons from the supermarket floor. Alex turned and headed back down the aisle, her heart pounding. How stupid she had been, she thought, as she abandoned her basket of shopping near the foyer of the supermarket. How naive to think that for once she had been the one who had been calling the shots.
She hurried back to the car and locked herself inside. Beneath her shirt, her heart was pounding. She felt sticky and hot despite the cold. She pulled off her coat and turned on the engine. From the pocket of her coat, her mobile began to ring. It linked up to the car’s Bluetooth system. She looked to the dash.
Chloe.
Alex hesitated. The coward in her wanted to ignore the call. How was she supposed to talk to Chloe as though everything was normal, when everything was so clearly not? She couldn’t rid her brain of the image she had seen in Harry’s office. She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to hold a conversation with Chloe without mentioning the video. Keeping if from her would be as good as lying and Alex didn’t want to do that, not to Chloe. She wasn’t sure she could.
She didn’t have to. The ringing stopped, her phone cutting Chloe to the answerphone.
Chapter Forty-Three